Gulf oil spill transposed to the English Channel. Source: Ifitwasmyhome.com. Click on the map to see how the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico measures up over your local landscape.

British politicians and the British press have woken up offended by the depth of American anger at British Petroleum. There is a failure of imagination here. The fury would be white-hot if the spill were off British shores and an American company were responsible. No, that’s insufficient. There are no words for how the British would react if the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill were gushing into the English Channel every week for nine weeks and counting.

Yet leaving aside the dander of London’s twit of a Tory mayor and his relic friends from the Thatcher era, as the horror at the carnage mounts, and the British have no choice but to get off their high horses and into the toxic morass of this incomprehensible disaster, like it or not of their own making, it’s clear that we are all ultimately responsible, with arguable exceptions for the Amish. One website is driving home the cost of our addiction to oil by asking readers to put themselves in the path of the spill. Ifitwasmyhome.com allows visitors to put in their address to create a map to see how big the spill would be relevant to their known local landmarks. If after doing that finger pointing and shouting still seems appropriate, then by all means do it, preferably in ways that speed progress toward renewable energy and better town planning to wean us from oil. Ifitwasmyhome.com also suggests that we volunteer for clean up efforts or make donations to the National Wildlife Federation or International Bird Rescue.

Source: NOAA. Click on the map for the latest trajectory of the British Petroleum oil spill.